I was having the same problem with some of the BO REST services (some of which went away after we rebooted our server).
You don't say which technology you're using to call the web services, but here's how you'd get the error information in a C# application.
In my C# app, below are the functions I use to call a GET & POST Business Objects 4.x REST service, and if something goes wrong, it attempts to read in the error message, so we get more than just "404 not found" or "503 Server error"...
To use these functions, you must've logged into BO and got a Login token.
protected string CallGETWebService(string URL, string token)
{
HttpWebRequest GETRequest = null;
try
{
GETRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(URL);
GETRequest.Method = "GET";
GETRequest.Accept = "application/xml";
GETRequest.Timeout = 3 * 60 * 1000; // Wait for upto 3 minutes
GETRequest.KeepAlive = false;
GETRequest.Headers.Add("X-SAP-LogonToken", token);
HttpWebResponse GETResponse = (HttpWebResponse)GETRequest.GetResponse();
Stream GETResponseStream = GETResponse.GetResponseStream();
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(GETResponseStream);
string response = reader.ReadToEnd();
return response;
}
catch (WebException ex)
{
// If the web service throws an exception, attempt to see if it give us any clues about what went wrong.
string exception = GetExceptionMessage(URL, ex);
throw new Exception(exception);
}
}
protected string CallPOSTWebService(string URL, string token, string XMLdata)
{
try
{
// Call a "POST" web service, passing it some XML, and expecting some XML back as a Response.
byte[] formData = UTF8Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(XMLdata);
HttpWebRequest POSTRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(URL);
POSTRequest.Method = "POST";
POSTRequest.ContentType = "application/xml";
POSTRequest.Accept = "application/xml";
POSTRequest.Timeout = 3 * 60 * 1000; // Wait for upto 3 minutes
POSTRequest.KeepAlive = false;
POSTRequest.ContentLength = formData.Length;
POSTRequest.Headers.Add("X-SAP-LogonToken", token);
Stream POSTstream = POSTRequest.GetRequestStream();
POSTstream.Write(formData, 0, formData.Length);
HttpWebResponse POSTResponse = (HttpWebResponse)POSTRequest.GetResponse();
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(POSTResponse.GetResponseStream(), Encoding.UTF8);
string response = reader.ReadToEnd();
return response;
}
catch (WebException ex)
{
// If the web service throws an exception, attempt to see if it give us any clues about what went wrong.
string exception = GetExceptionMessage(URL, ex);
throw new Exception(exception);
}
}
protected string GetExceptionMessage(string URL, WebException ex)
{
// If one of the BO web service threw an exception, attempt to see if it give us any clues about what went wrong.
string exception = "An exception occurred whilst calling: " + URL + ", " + ex.Message;
try
{
if (ex.Response == null)
return exception;
if (ex.Response.ContentLength == 0)
return exception;
using (Stream sr = ex.Response.GetResponseStream())
{
// The web service will return a string containing XML, which we need to parse, to obtain the actual error message.
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(sr);
string XMLResponse = reader.ReadToEnd();
XElement XML = XElement.Parse(XMLResponse);
XElement XMLException = XML.Elements().Where(e => e.Name.LocalName == "message").FirstOrDefault();
if (XMLException != null)
exception = XMLException.Value; // eg "Info object with ID 132673 not found. (RWS 000012)"
}
}
catch
{
// If the web service returned some other kind of response, don't let it crash our Exception handler !
}
return exception;
}
The important thing here is that if BO's REST services fail, the GetResponse() will throw a WebException, and we then use my GetExceptionMessage() function to check the error response (which the BO Rest Services return in XML format) and try to extract the error message from it.
Using this functionality, our C# code can throw an exception with some useful information in it:
Info object with ID 132673 not found. (RWS 000012)
..rather than just throwing a vague exception like this (which, by the way, is what all of SAP's own C# examples will do, as none include any error-handling)...
(404) Page not found
(503) Service unavailable
I've also had cases where the BO REST Services will actually throw a "(503) Service Unavailable" exception... which was completely misleading ! Again, this code will help to give us the real error message.
If BO's REST services are successful, they'll return a string containing some XML data. Let's look at some sample code showing how we'd use my functions to call the REST service to get details about a particular Webi Report.
We'll call the REST services, then convert the XML response string into an XElement, so we can obtain the Report's name from the XML.
string token = /* Your login-token */
string URL = string.Format("http://MyServer:6405/biprws/infostore/{0}", ReportID);
string WebiReportResponse = CallGETWebService(URL, token);
// Parse the web service's XML response, and obtain the name of our Webi Report
XElement ReportDetails = XElement.Parse(WebiReportResponse);
XElement title = ReportDetails.Elements().Where(e => e.Name.LocalName == "title").FirstOrDefault();
string ReportName = (title == null) ? "Unknown" : title.Value;
I thoroughly loathe the SAP documentation (and lack of it).
Life would've been MUCH easier if SAP themselves had provided some sample .Net code like this...
